One of my favorite stories by master storyteller Jack London.
Once upon a time short story writers could make very good money. In the days before movie theaters and television, magazines like The Saturday Evening Post offered some of the best entertainment around. And they paid well to feature these marquis writers on their covers.
Just over a century ago the highest paid of these scribes was a writer named Jack London. London was no artsy fartsy powderpuff sitting on hillsides waiting for inspiration to strike. For Jack London writing was a craft and a discipline. Day in, day out he slammed out one thousand words of prose. By the time his life was cut short at age forty, his output had been immense — as many as fifty volumes of stories, novels, plays and essays.
Many of us know him for the short story “To Build a Fire,” an intense, tightly woven man vs. nature chiller that takes place up in the Klondike. Or perhaps we were first captured by his Call of the Wild. And while there are many great London tales I could recommend, my all time favorite story has to be “A Piece of Steak.”
First published in The Saturday Evening Post, Volume 182, November 1909, “A Piece of Steak” is the tale of an aging boxer. London places a lens on a single fight in boxer Tom King’s life and reveals…
